Quick Roundup 333

Monday, June 02, 2008

Okay. Blogger is doing strange things today, so I'm periodically saving drafts of this post in Gmail so I can post it easily later on, no matter what Blogger decides to do.... If you follow a link and it opens in a separate window -- something I find irritating -- that's Gmail's default for links -- and it "corrected" me without my catching it.

Two More Editorials on Big Oil Bad Government

Via HBL, I learned about two more good, recent editorials about the actual causes of rising gas prices to go along with Alex Epstein's. Enjoy and, if you ever want to see them come down again, spread the word.

Gus Van Horn, Snapdragon, at Your Service!

Like my aunt, I have a green thumb, so I enjoyed taking this quiz!

You are a Snapdragon. Mischief is your middle name, but your first is friend. You are quite the prankster that loves to make other people laugh.
A wave in the wind to Violet and Daffodil, and a mischievous meme tag to our local orchid enthusiast. (Just living up to my middle name, there!)

As an interesting aside, I see that the host of the quiz hails from suburban Cleveland! My wife was born in those parts....

Life after Congress

The Resident Egoist has a very interesting post about the evils of bipartisanship.

Harvey Korman, RIP

When I was a kid, I'd watch Carol Burnett re-runs after school, so I was sad to see that Harvey Korman has died. Grant Jones has a video of a skit of his about airport security posted over at his blog.

Visual Illusion Contest

Did you know that, for the past five years, the Vision Sciences Society has held a visual illusion contest? I haven't looked at all of them yet, but you can see this year's top ten entrants. "Ghostly Gaze" is kinda creepy....

-- CAV

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gus,

As a kid, I too was a Carol Burnett Show fan because of Harvey Korman and Tim Conway. Their skits together -- with Conway as the snail-paced old man and Korman as his impatient pal (sorry, I don’t remember their actual relationship) -- were side-splitters.

Joseph Kellard

Gus Van Horn said...

Joseph,

I once looked up Korman on "AmIAnnoying.com" and saw that as a reason he could be annoying that he'd sometimes break out of character and crack up during the skits -- but that as a reason he might not be that some of his fans looked forward to such moments.

I was one of the latter, because it made it seem like he was really enjoying himself as a performer.

Gus

Clay said...

Firefox has an extension called tab mix plus which will allow you to control window and tab behavior.

There is an option to "enable single window mode," which basically forces all links that attempt to open in a new window to open in a new tab.

You can also refine how your tabs work.

This is the most important FF extension that I use.. I almost literally can't surf the 'net w/o it. I avoided upgrading to FF3's beta until I discovered that tab mix plus has a beta of its own that works w/ FF3 on the developer's website.

Here is a link to the Mozilla add-on's page for Tab Mix Plus.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1122

P.S. If you are using IE I feel bad for you. ;P

Gus Van Horn said...

I use IE ONLY at work, to fill out time sheets -- because my employer uses time management crapware that requires IE.

I use Windows only at work, and only for a few applications that haven't been ported to Linux.

Otherwise, I use Linux (and usually Firefox).

As for links opening in separate windows, I know I can preempt that by simply holding CTRL when I click on a link.

What I was ranting about was that GMail (at least used to) insert HTML into every link that would make it open in a separate window if you simply clicked it.

I HATE computer programs that write code for me and I hate stupid defaults. That is (or was) both.

Having said that, I didn't see any such pidgin HTML today, but since I was able to finish the post in Blogger, I can't conclusively rule out that GMail still does that.

Lynne said...

Gus, you should use your middle name for good, not evil! I began to fear that Amit Ghate had been sabotaged! Or worse, that I had a bible virus! (From one snapdragon to another - that was a rather subtle bit of mischief. I'll have to remember it.)

I was sad to hear about Harvey Korman too. Those crazy kids always looked like they were having a great time on the Carol Burnett Show.

Gus Van Horn said...

You may scold me, but you are a true snapdragon -- you will use that one yourself later on!

It's too good not to!